A new look at the dollars inside Arkansas athletics is revealing
When a school's football program is in shambles the way Arkansas football currently is, fans quickly pivot from the games themselves to the questions about financing and administrative competence. With the 2026 season already in ruins, and everyone seeing how outclassed Arkansas is against quality competition, fans are correctly thinking about bigger questions, such as whether the athletic director should be fired and how the program gets off the mat. Some research was published on Monday by the site NILnomics which offered a clearer look at where Arkansas is and why.
In 2025, Arkansas' basketball spending rose by 131 percent. Football spending rose by 28.5 percent. Notably, the dollar amounts represented by those increases were close to identical. A 131 percent increase in basketball spending carried UA from 9.2 million dollars to 21.3 million dollars, a total of 12.1 million bucks. The 28.5 percent increase in football spending carried the school from 44.6 million dollars to 57.4 million dollars, or 12.8 million bucks. You can see what a monster football is. It already takes up so much of the financial pie that a $12.8 million increase isn't a game-changer in overall funding. Basketball, on the other hand, starts with such a low floor that a new infusion of $12.1 million feels like a gold mine.
Arkansas basketball was given 11.5 percent of the 2025 UA athletic department budget. That placed the Hogs first among all SEC basketball schools - yes, even higher than Kentucky by half a percentage point. Hunter Yurachek came from Houston, a basketball school which was beginning to regain relevance under coach Kelvin Sampson when Yurachek moved to Arkansas. It's no surprise that Yurachek understands how to fund and support basketball, and of course, John Calipari wouldn't have agreed to become Arkansas coach if he didn't know he would get robust support from his athletic director.
However, if nearly the same amount of money (between 12 and 13 million dollars) is being devoted to both football and basketball, that's obviously not a good sign for the football program or Yurachek's track record as the custodian of the football program. What also isn't a good look for Arkansas and Yurachek is that Arkansas' overall athletic budget of $184.1 million is 13th of the 15 SEC schools which file public reports, according to the NILnomics research. Percent of athletic department funding and "overall dollars flowing into the football program" are two very different things. NIL is regularly funded by non-athletic department sources. This is why, as the NILnomics research showed, Texas and Tennessee and LSU actually don't get high percentages of football funding from their athletic departments. The money comes from non-athletic department sources.
This is where the Hunter Yurachek conversation becomes clearer. Yurachek needs to be convincing the high-roller donors to form their own massive money pipeline to really juice up the football program in the NIL space. This is where the Texases and LSUs of the world are able to commit such massive resource amounts to football. Arkansas is nowhere to be found in all of this. It's the AD's job to convince well-pocketed individuals and entities to invest in football. Instead, Yurachek has Ryan Silverfield dialing for dollars when the coach is in an impossible situation and has no on-the-ground credibility.
It's all very messed up, as we know, but this research paper from NILnomics sheds light on why Arkansas football is in this exquisite predicament.
